Free Republic

In Florida trial involving classified documents, Donald Trump’s lawyers are seeking more information about a Department of Energy clearance list Former president Donald Trump’s lawyers say they may use evidence suggesting that Trump had a high-level security clearance as recently as last year to bolster their defense that the former president was acting in “good-faith and non-criminal states of mind” when he took sensitive documents from the White House to his Florida residence after leaving office. The revelation came in a legal filing late Tuesday night in which Trump’s attorneys urged Judge Aileen M. Cannon — who is overseeing Trump’s...

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) will conduct low-altitude helicopter flights over downtown Boston and the Boston Marathon race route, Friday, Oct. 8, through Monday, Oct. 11. NNSA’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) aircraft will measure naturally occurring background radiation as part of standard preparations to protect public health and safety on the day of the event. The aerial surveys are in support of the 2021 Boston Marathon. The public may see NNSA’s twin-engine Bell 412 helicopter, which is equipped with radiation sensing technology. The helicopter will fly in a grid pattern over the areas at...

The Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, have evidence that hackers accessed their networks as part of an extensive espionage operation that has affected at least half a dozen federal agencies, officials directly familiar with the matter said.On Thursday, DOE and NNSA officials began coordinating notifications about the breach to their congressional oversight bodies after being briefed by Rocky Campione, the chief information officer at DOE.They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office...

The Trump administration fired the heads of three federal agencies after the election, prompting one to claim he was retaliated against for disagreeing with some policy. The heads of the agencies that oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile, electricity and natural gas regulation and overseas aid were sent packing, NPR reported. The sudden departures included Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who was forced to resign Friday. She was the first woman to oversee the agency in charge of the nuclear stockpile. Last year, she was on the president’s short list as a possible replacement for former National...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - They’re members of a prestigious academic panel with top-secret clearances who’ve advised the Pentagon on some of America’s most vexing national security issues since the Cold War. Over 60 years, they’ve won 11 Nobel prizes and conducted hundreds of government studies. The advisory group, known as Jason, is a team of some 60 of America’s top physicists and scientists who spend each summer in La Jolla, California, conducting studies commissioned by the Pentagon and other U.S. government agencies. On March 28, Trump appointee Michael Griffin – the Pentagon’s chief technology officer – unexpectedly moved to terminate...

<p>MERCURY, Nev. (AP) — Authorities shot and killed a man who entered a secured federal site north of Las Vegas where the government used to test nuclear bombs.</p> <p>A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration says the man failed to stop at the security gate on Monday at the Nevada National Security Site. Darwin Morgan says the man drove for about 8 miles before he parked, got out of his car and approached security officials.</p>

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s (DOE/NNSA) will conduct a low-altitude helicopter flight over portions of the Arlington, Va., area July 22 to measure naturally occurring background radiation. Officials from NNSA announced that the radiation assessment will cover approximately three square miles. A twin-engine Bell 412 helicopter, operated by the Remote Sensing Laboratory Aerial Measuring System from Joint Base Andrews, will be equipped with radiation sensing technology. The helicopter will fly in a grid pattern over the area at 150 feet (or higher) above the ground surface, at a speed of approximately 80 miles...

Managers at one of the nation’s premier federal laboratories improperly used taxpayer funds to influence members of Congress and other officials as part of an effort to extend the lab’s $2.4 billion management contract, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General said in a report Wednesday. A review of documents determined that Sandia National Laboratories formed a team and worked with consultants beginning in 2009 to develop a plan for securing a contract extension without having to go through a competitive process. That plan called for lobbying Congress, trying to influence key advisers to then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu...

Virtually every major project under the National Nuclear Security Administration’s oversight is behind schedule and over budget—the result, watchdogs and government auditors say, of years of lax accountability and nearly automatic annual budget increases for the agency responsible for maintaining the nation’s nuclear stockpile. The NNSA has racked up $16 billion in cost overruns on 10 major projects that are a combined 38 years behind schedule, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reports. Other projects have been canceled or suspended, despite hundreds of millions of dollars already spent, because they grew too bloated. …

A U.S. supercomputer has won back the crown in the never-ending battle for the world's most powerful supercomputer. Its victory is the latest milestone marking the steady climb of computing power all across the globe. The Top500 industry list gave its No. 1 ranking to the Sequoia supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California — a spot earned by Sequoia's ability to crunch 16.32 quadrillion calculations per second (16.32 petaflops/s). Such supercomputing power is used by the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to simulate nuclear weapons tests for older weapons that have been sitting in the U.S. arsenal....

The nation's chief nuclear response team has deployed its experts to Japan to assess dangers posed by the nuclear crisis in the wake of the devastating magnitude 9 earthquake. A team from the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy that protects America's nuclear weapons, left from Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas on Monday, an NNSA spokesman confirmed to FoxNews.com

Press Release NNSA Announces Completion of first B83 Dismantlement at Y-12 Jan 20, 2011 Program required development of new equipment and training program WASHINGTON, D.C. – The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced that its Y-12 National Security Complex has completed the dismantlement of the first secondary from a retired B83, one of the biggest weapon systems ever built. The B83 was introduced into the U.S. nuclear stockpile in 1983. While the B83 remains in service, some of its components have been replaced and some retired B83s have been removed from the stockpile. “Dismantlement of the first B83 secondary...

Minute Man II missile with a "replica" nuclear warhead was successfully launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, officials said. The National Nuclear Security Administration conducted the test in cooperation with the U.S. Air Force, an NNSA release said Thursday. The test was to evaluate the overall performance of the U.S. intercontinental ballistic weapon system, NNSA said. "This successful JTA (warhead) test illustrates NNSA's commitment to ensuring that all weapon systems perform as designed," said Brig. Gen. Garrett Harencak, NNSA Principal Assistant Deputy Administrator for Military Application. "The continued strong cooperation between the NNSA and (the Department of Defense) is...

The government is upgrading the X-ray technology that detects flaws in its nuclear weapons stockpile. The new machine, called the Confined Large Optical Scintillator Screen and Imaging System, or CoLOSSIS, uses thousands of 2D X-ray images to produce one 3D image depicting the inside of a nuclear weapon — the same way CT scanners generate 3D images of the inside of a human body. Developers say the new system will pick up more defects in the nuclear stockpile than the current 2D sensors and will eliminate the need to disassemble weapons to search for problems, which is a process that...

Japan and the United States will launch working-level talks in February aimed at promoting cooperation in the field of nuclear forensics, a sophisticated process to analyze the composition of nuclear materials, Kyodo News reported on Nan. 30 quoting sources of both governments as having said . Representatives of Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, an organization under the Department of Energy, will attend the talks. It would be the first intergovernmental consultation on nuclear forensics between Japan and the United States. Nuclear forensics focuses on analyzing the nature, use and...

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has announced that it recently completed the installation and successful startup of a new surveillance diagnostic tool that is capable of detecting aging defects on critical components in the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. In response to NNSA's need to implement cost effective, optimized inspection of nuclear components (also known as "surveillance transformation"), scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) teamed with NNSA's Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, to develop a new X-ray computed tomography (CT) system to image nuclear weapon components. The new CT scan will enhance NNSA's surveillance program...

Today, the Los Angeles Times published a story about how the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that the "first refurbished W76 nuclear warhead had been accepted into the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile by the Navy," when in fact no delivery was ever made to the Navy. POGO alerted the Times about the story because the NNSA was (mis)using the example of the W76 to promote itself. In March of this year, NNSA's Deputy Administrator boasted of the refurbished W76: "This is another great example of the unsurpassed expertise throughout NNSA's national security enterprise." In fact, it was the NNSA's...

Despite a 2003 commitment to fix the problem, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) still cannot assure that it is carrying out corrective actions to address nuclear warhead anomalies that may significantly affect the safety, security and reliability of the nation's stockpile, according to the Energy Department's inspector general. The findings follow two other recent reports by Inspector General Gregory Friedman reflecting internal allegations or disagreements among officials at DoE's Sandia National Laboratories over safety and quality assurance issues related to the nation's stockpile. In one case, the inspector general suggested top DoE officials had not been fully informed of...

WASHINGTON, July 13 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy has started an enforcement action against Los Alamos National Laboratory. The department and its National Nuclear Security Administration announced Friday they had started a "formal enforcement actions ... against the University of California and the Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the prior and current management and operating contractors of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico." The action was being taken "for violations of classified information security requirements under their respective contracts," the NNSA said in a statement. "Investigations revealed that management deficiencies of both contractors were a central...

An internal audit has discovered that twenty computers have disappeared from a critical counterintelligence agency tasked with protecting America's nuclear secrets. Fourteen of the computers contained classified material, marking yet another in a string of embarrassments for the Department of Energy: The office in charge of protecting American technical secrets about nuclear weapons from foreign spies is missing 20 desktop computers, at least 14 of which have been used for classified information, the Energy Department inspector general reported on Friday. This is the 13th time in a little over four years that an audit has found that the department, whose...